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At a personal growth seminar I attended in Chicago, we were invited to find a stranger and hug them. I crossed the room and wrapped my arms around a U.S. Marine Corps officer. As I gently pulled him towards me, instead of relaxing into the hug, he became rigid and kept repeating “man hug, man hug.” After the hugging exercise ended, he let out a barely audible sigh of relief.

Later in the program, I “came out” to my small group. The Marine stared past me. I was too afraid to hug other men at the seminar after that. It was the same fear of holding a boyfriend’s hand in public — always doing mental calculations about who might be watching with disgust or violence in their hearts.

Very few queer people feel safe in public with their affection.

The hug between the Marine and me should have been innocent. Instead it was charged with reactions conditioned by abstract ideas like “real men are not supposed to act like women and be intimate with other men” and “intimate touch always leads to an erotic conclusion.”

We learn the habits of abstraction in the capitalist division of labor where we create and reproduce our material life. As workers we don’t create the things we need to live for people we actually know and love. Instead, we sell our labor to enrich the owners of private property by producing commodities for sale on abstract marketplaces. The commodities we produce travel far beyond our community and other commodities return to us abstracted from the people who made them. We’re abstracted away from directly experiencing our human, social existence in labor. As a mediation of commodities pours into our senses, we are constantly oriented to having and unconsciously yield our social wealth to participate in an abstraction of private property that confronts us with hostility. Private property creates an abstract way of being in the world that multiplies throughout human life and prevents us from making other human beings the end of all our activity. Karl Marx saw freedom from private property as the positive transcendence of all estrangement.

The positive transcendence of private property as the appropriation of human [essence], is therefore the positive transcendence of all estrangement – that is to say, the return of man from religion, family, state, etc., to his human, i.e., social, existence. [i]

Human essence, appropriated and estranged by private property, is the assemblage of our social interactions with other human beings. The phrase “social flesh” in the work of Wendy Harcourt and Arturo Escobar provides a good way to conceive of human essence:

We need to understand the body not as bound to the private or to the self — the western idea of the autonomous individual — but as being linked integrally to material expressions of community and public space. In this sense there is no neat divide between the corporeal and the social; there is instead what has been called a “social flesh.” [ii]

As Marx observed Capitalism emerging on the world scene, the cost of private property to our ability to mediate adequately as a species concerned him so deeply that he devoted his life to deconstructing the abstractional mechanisms of the economic system. We are ultrasocial mammals whose brains are wired to respond to others. He wanted to understand how Capitalism would block our natural human capacity to adequately exchange love, trust and other human qualities integral to our being as a species. In a beautiful passage in the 1844 Manuscripts Marx writes:

Let us assume man to be man, and his relation to the world to be a human one. Then love can only be exchanged for love, trust for trust, etc. …if you wish to influence other people you must be a person who really has a stimulating and encouraging effect upon others…If you love without evoking love in return, i.e., if you are not able, by the manifestation of yourself as a loving person, to make yourself a beloved person, then your love is impotent and a misfortune. [iii]

Instead of ‘subject-subject consciousness’ where our being as loving persons mediates with others to make us beloved persons, the economic system produces ‘subject-object consciousness.’ In ‘subject-object consciousness’ people are seen as a means to an end instead of ends in themselves and all human relationships become relationships between things. Love, trust and other human qualities essential to our being as a species cease to flow adequately in the social flesh.

In the first abstractional habit that carved borders in the social flesh between the Marine and me, human beings are divided into two genders, men are privileged over women and the “feminine” is devalued. The Marine’s conditioned reaction during the hug was rooted in the idea that “real men are not supposed to act like women and be intimate with other men.” The socialization of “real men” starts when the doctor slaps a gender into a baby and declares, “You have a boy.” All kinds of roles grow out of assignment to the male side of the gender binary. If you want to hug another boy, arrange flowers or express your emotions, bullies are often available on the playground to shame you physically or emotionally. Often we internalize gender norms enough to simply bully ourselves into conformity with the boy code. We learn at a very young age that boys are not allowed to be like girls.

In contrast to my experience with the U.S. Marine Corps officer, I disappear into the Rocky Mountains several times a year to participate in the intimacy of heart circles with other gay, bisexual, trans* and queer men. We sit together in a large circle and speak from our hearts, and listen to one another through our hearts. Usually a stone is used to identify the man who is speaking and the other men listen without interruption or feedback with as much attention and compassion as can be mustered. The stone is then passed on and the process is repeated. The intimacy shared between men results in some of the most deeply emotional, healing and transformative experiences in our lives. So much of the trauma we bring to the heart circle as queer men originates in the policing of the “feminine” between men, and much of the healing we bring to one another grows from opening our hearts to the “feminine” being of the circle.

The devaluation of the “feminine” in this abstraction presents in a different way in the male supremacist family which was the root of the capitalist division of labor discussed above. In the early stages of the development of the family, when the state was weak and the family was one of the few sources of authority, women were the slaves of men in the family. In Marx on Gender and the Family, Heather Brown writes that women “became slaves of the men of the family, since men are the ones to acquire property, including the women and children. The male head of household has the power to dispose of the labor-power of the other members of his family. This will be the germ of development for class-antagonisms in the future.”[iv]

In the second abstractional habit that carved borders in the social flesh between the Marine and me, there was fear that intimate touch always leads to an erotic conclusion. The Marine’s conditioned reaction during the hug also revealed this border carved in the social flesh. Intimacy expressed between people who are not part of the same family or in a romantic relationship is “subjected to intense scrutiny, constraint and speculation — both internally and externally.”[v] Corporations use sex and sexual attractiveness in advertising to drive us to consumption and to encode messages directly in our sexuality with ubiquitous porn. We’re encouraged to market ourselves as sexual commodities in bars, on hookup sites and online dating services, made confident by anti-wrinkle cream, Viagra and cosmetic surgery. “As we’re sold the narrative that we’re ‘free’ to have sex how, when, where and with whom we choose, it becomes the only conduit through which we are permitted to experience intimacy.”[vi] As our desires become optimized in a hyper-sexualized marketplace, it creates an impoverished affective range between us, a lost terrain of intimacy between those who are neither family nor lovers.

Our sexuality is vulnerable to commodification because it often functions as an opiate for alienation in labor. Work in capitalist societies does not belong to our intrinsic nature, affirm us, content us or allow us to freely develop our physical and mental energies. “The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work,” writes Karl Marx, “and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home.” Sexuality “taken abstractly, separated from the sphere of all other human activity and turned into sole and ultimate ends,” functions in alienated ways. [viii]

In contrast to my experience with the U.S. Marine Corps officer, my trips into the Rocky Mountains also include the intimacy of touch with other gay, bisexual, trans* and queer men. In a room perfumed with soft light, cedar and music, we undress and take turns pouring oil into our hands and giving one another massages. This is not about men having sex together, but about intimacy and touch that recovers that lost terrain of intimacy between those who are neither family nor lovers. Younger men touch older men, older men touch younger men, HIV-positive men touch HIV-negative men, HIV-negative men touch HIV-positive men, white men touch black men, Asian men touch Latino men, cisgender men touch transgender men, transgender men touch cisgender men and people with different economic realities embrace one another.

Heart circles and intimate touch flow from Radical Faerie culture, “a desire to escape and counter the rapid commodification of urban gay culture in the wake of early gay liberation politics.” Harry Hay, deeply influenced by Marx, founded the Radical Faeries. He also founded the Mattachine Society, the first sustained queer rights organization in the United States.

Harry Hay promoted an ethics of developing ‘subject-subject consciousness’ on the basis that ‘one must always treat others a subjects like themselves, never as objects, or as a means to some instrumental end.’ For Hay, subject-object relations amongst gay men were a product of the increasing ‘hetero-normative’ focus of urban gay life that accompanied the growing commodification of the gay scene. He hoped that the rural retreats, gatherings and communal ‘sanctuaries’ developed by men inspired by the Faeries would create space where queer men could collectively build new relationships with each other based on intimacy and an ethics of speaking from the heart. [ix]

The space of appearance in the Rocky Mountains transforms many of us because we experience our species-being beyond abstraction. For a weekend we experience what it might feel like to live in a post-capitalist society, to move from subject-object to subject-subject consciousness. Marx described this full emancipation of human senses and qualities in the 1844 Manuscripts:

The transcendence of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object — an object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, and vica versa…the senses and minds of other men have become my own appropriation. Besides these direct organs, therefore, social organs develop in the form of society; thus, for instance, activity in direct association with others, etc, has become an organ for expressing my own life; and the mode of appropriating human life…man is not lost in his object only when the object becomes for him a human object…This is possible only when the object becomes for him a social object, he himself for himself a social being, just as society becomes a being for his in this object. [x]

The two abstractional habits that carved borders in the social flesh between the Marine and me are interlocked with the larger abstractions including private property, religion, family, and the state. Mainstream LGBT politics has sought to create a world free of trauma by constructing gender and sexual identities to challenge heteromasculinity — counter-abstractions to challenge the dominant abstraction. The strategy in mainstream LGBT politics after the 1980s has been to extend the abstractions of private property, religion, family, and the state to embrace these identities. The problem with this strategy, while understandable in the existing material conditions, is that it continues to reproduce the abstractions between us that prevent us from adequately mediating as a species and returning to a fully human, social existence.

The abstractions of private property, religion, family and the state allow partial interest to dominate the whole of society. This is possible because our human essence gets objectified in the production of these abstractions instead of in natural species-connection. In the core abstraction, the owners of private property (partial) dominate workers who have to sell their labor to survive (whole). The other abstractions follow this general law. The state (partial) dominates the people (whole) with representation, laws and police to protect the interests of the owners of private property. Religion (partial) dominates the people (whole) by constructing a “‘picture’ for contemplation and an organization that cultivates our captivity to that ‘picture’…We can no longer see and hear [the] contours of our [human] existence as we only apprehend that which is indicated in a free-floating matrix of an imposed interpretation.” [xi] Marx applied this same critique to Atheism and to other forms of reified ideology. He connects the abstractions of private property and religion in the first volume of Capital. The way human beings are captured by private property (commodity fetishism) functions in a similar way to how we are captured by religion. “In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and the human race.” [xii] Men (partial), the privileged captains of private property, dominate women and children in the family and exclude other forms of love and relationship (whole). Children are removed from adequate nurture in the community. The family becomes an architecture for reducing wages for the profit of the owners of private property and containing their wealth through inheritance.

Most importantly, when the partial dominates the whole, the polis or “space of appearance” is stolen from the people. The polis is a metaphor constantly used by Hannah Arendt, a German-born Jewish American political theorist. In the The Human Condition she writes, “The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.” The polis is the space of appearance “where I appear to others and others appear to me…wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action.” [xiii]

The space of appearance must be continually recreated by action; its existence is secured whenever actors gather together for the purpose of discussing and deliberating about matters of public concern, and it disappears the moment these activities cease. It is always a potential space that finds its actualization in the actions and speeches of individuals who have come together to undertake some common project…It is a product of action because it arises out of the concerted activities of a plurality of agents, and it rests on persuasion because it consists in the ability to secure the consent of others through unconstrained discussion and debate. [xiv]

As an example, take the state (partial) which dominates the people (whole) with representation, laws and police to protect the interests of the owners of private property. Voting for political representation is ultimately a trick where we surrender our space of appearance to another, who in our day and age will serve the interests of the corporations. Without adequate space of appearance, the world shatters into abstractions preventing us from adequately mediating as a species.

The strategy of assimilation in mainstream LGBT politics results in an expanded reproduction of the same contradiction between partiality and universality, and shores up the top-down structures of male supremacy essential to Capitalism’s survival. Assimilation pink washes partial interest to obtain a particular set of abstract rights and bypasses the struggle necessary to help society internalize “feminine” being in the space of appearance and to overthrow the structures of male supremacy. “Marx’s solution consisted in defining the problem in terms of the concrete dialectical concept of ‘partiality prevailing as universality’,” writes renowned Marxist philosopher István Mészáros, “in opposition to genuine universality which alone could embrace the manifold interests of society as a whole and of man as a ‘species-being’ (Gattungswesen — i.e. man liberated form the domination of crude, individualistic self-interest).” [xv]

Queer history is filled with stories about hiding at our workplaces, being cast out by our religious traditions and families, and even police raiding our bars. The violence of heteromasculinity can help us to see how the abstractions of private property, religion, family and the state operate in concrete ways to prevent us from being adequately mediating as a species. Our goal should not simply be assimilation with abstractions (lives depend on it — abstractions are really that dangerous), but adequate separation from the abstractions that carve borders in the social flesh.

The return to an authentic species-being beyond abstraction begins with labor, “an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself.” [xvi]

The veil is not removed from the countenance of the social life-process, i.e. the process of material production, until it becomes production by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control.” [xvii]

From production by freely associated people, society can be reorganized from the bottom up in a way that preserves the polis, the space of appearance where we can return to a human, i.e. social, existence. Mikhail Bakunin wrote:

The future social organization should be carried out from the bottom up, by the free association or federation of workers, starting with the associations, then going on to the communes, the regions, the nations, and, finally, culminating in a great international and universal federation. It is only then that the true, life-giving social order of liberty and general welfare will come into being, a social order which, far from restricting, will affirm and reconcile the interests of individuals and of society. [xviii]

— — — — —

[i] Karl Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
[ii] Wendy Harcourt and Arturo Escobar. 2002. “Women and the politics of place.” Development 45 (1): 7–14. Karl Marx described it this way in the Theses on Feuerbach, VI: “The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.” French Philosopher Etienne Balibar elaborates on the thesis by describing human essence as “the multiple and active relations which individuals establish with each other…and the fact that it is these relations which define what they have in common, the ‘genus’. They define this because they constitute it at each moment in multiple forms…Not what is ideally ‘in’ each individual (as a form or a substance), or what would serve, from outside, to classify that individual, but what exists between individuals by dint of their multiple interactions.” See Etienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, Verso 2007, p. 30 and 32.
[iii] Karl Marx, “The Power of Money,” The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
[iv] Heather A. Brown, Marx on Gender and the Family: A Critical Study, Haymarket Books 2012, p. 42.
[v] Jenny Alexander, “Alexander Berkman: Sexual dissidence in the first wave anarchist movement and its subsequent narratives,” Anarchism & Sexuality: Ethics, Relationships and Power, Routledge, 2012, p. 38
[vi] Alexander, p. 37
[vii] Alexander, p. 40
[viii] Karl Marx, “Estranged Labor,” The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
[ix] Gavin Brown, “The creation of autonomous queer spaces,” Anarchism & Sexuality: Ethics, Relationships and Power, Routledge, 2012, p. 209.
[x] Karl Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
[xi] James Lochte, “Marx and the Sacred,” Journal of Church and State.
[xii] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Penguin Classics, p. 165.
[xiii] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, p. 198–199.
[xiv] “Hannah Arendt,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
[xv] István Mészáros. Marx’s Theory of Alienation. Merlin Press, 2005, p. 32.
[xvi] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Penguin Classics, p. 14
[xvii] Marx, p. 15
[xviii] Mikhail Bakunin, “The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State,” 1871

A few years ago I attended a training program offered by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) on organizing unions in the workplace. This local, like the national union, is largely made up of white, straight men. During the workshop, the IWW trainer stated that it was important to select your best workplace leaders in organizing a union and deal with their oppressive behaviors like racism, sexism, transphobia or homophobia as best you can. When I challenged this idea with my experiences of discrimination as a queer worker, I was told that this training was about class struggle, not the divisiveness of identity politics. The workers at the training were unable to see how they enacted their white, straight male identities in this space of appearance by minimizing the importance of anti-oppression in selecting leaders for workplace organizing. The three queer workers who attended the training that weekend permanently left the local branch of the IWW.

In the space of appearance the enactment of identity prevents human beings from adequately mediating together as a species. I’m using the space of appearance in Hannah Arendt’s sense as “the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.” [i] The identity abstractions that separate us from one another in the space of appearance flow from the abstract ways of being created by the capitalist economic system. In other words, the economic system produces subject-object consciousness: I own the means of production (subject), you sell your labor to survive (object); I’m white (subject), you’re black (object); I’m male (subject), you’re female (object); I’m straight (subject), you’re trans (object). Subject-object consciousness prevents us from making other human beings the end of all our activity. The highly binary, individualistic, essentialist, identity-based and universalizing tendencies of identity abstractions that assemble in conceptual proliferation reveal the meta framework of subject-object consciousness produced by capitalism. [ii]

Identities are formed within social structures and people internalize them as a portion of their “self.” Identities are then activated as “role enactment,” often in groups that share similar identities. “Conventions accrue, building layer upon layer over time, taking hold in patterns, images, and built environments,” writes Chad Kautzer, “they are infused with normalizing discourses that make social patterns and relations of domination seem like natural laws.” [iii] Normative identities like whiteness, maleness and straightness are held in place by carefully constructed ideologies and power relations that produce unequal access to resources and trauma for others who are then forced to enact non-normative counter identities to challenge their oppression. [iv]

The Buddha challenges all of this in the Sakunagghi Sutta by showing that we don’t have any kind of fixed, stable identity that we are.

“Wander in your proper range,” the Buddha wrote about a territory before the construction of identity in the abstraction factory, “your own ancestral territory: focused on the body in & of itself, focused on mental qualities in & of themselves — ardent, alert, & mindful — putting aside greed & distress with reference to the world.” [v]

As phenomena flows into and within our senses, all we need is bare attention to just what is arising. Phenomena includes forms dancing into the eyes, sounds cascading off the ear drums, aromas wafting in the nasal cavities, flavors lighting up the tongue, tactile sensations activating the body, and thoughts swirling in the mind (thoughts are considered a sense in Buddhism). The ability to approach the world with bare attention to just what is arising is the “proper range” or “ancestoral territory” mapped out in this Sutta.

The Sutta opens with the story of a quail and hawk who enter into competition with one another. Both creatures leave their proper range and enter into combat and both end up maimed, the quail in the claws of the hawk, and the hawk with a broken breast. The Buddha uses the Pali word mara to describe the dangers of leaving ancestral territory. Mara, a mythological figure personifying death, is the insidious, impulsive, grasping tendency of every normal human being.” [vi]

Like the quail and the hawk, we unconsciously allow the phenomena flowing into our senses to morph into needless conceptual proliferation. We surrender ancestral territory to longing and discontent, likes and dislikes, good and bad, and right and wrong. Phenomena arrives with an agreeable, pleasing, charming, endearing, enticing quality that sparks the production of identity abstractions in our minds tethered to a sense-of-self shaped by ideologies and power relations, or reactions to them.

In this Sutta the Buddha holds out the possibility of living from a place of ancestral territory, resting in just what is arising in the senses. The Pali word for this refuge is satipatthana, our natural human capacity to be attentive to whatever is appearing in our being in an open, clear, nonintrusive manner. [vii]

It is important to root this Sutta in the biological processes involved in experiencing phenomena in the senses. In his book Conscilience, Edward O. Wilson describes what happens when the color red dances into our eyes. Wilson is a biologist and the author of two Pulitzer prize winning books, On Human Nature and The Ants.

When we see and speak of color, for example, visual information passes from the cones and interneurons of the retina through the thalamus to the visual cortex at the rear of the brain. After the information is codified and integrated anew at each step, through patterns of neuron firing, it then spreads forward to the speech centers of the lateral cortex. As a result, we first see red and then say “red”. Thinking about the phenomenon consists of adding more and more connections of pattern and meaning, and thus activating additional areas of the brain. The more novel and complicated the connections, the greater the amount of this spreading activation. The better the connections are learned by such experience, the more they are put on autopilot. [viii]

The place of bare attention to just what is arising in the senses is described as “The All” in the Sabba Sutta: “Simply the eye & forms, ear & sounds, nose & aromas, tongue & flavors, body & tactile sensations, intellect & ideas.” This is the proper range before conceptual proliferation ejects us from an awareness of the present moment. “It might be assumed that we are always aware of the present,” writes Theravada Buddhist monk Bhikkhu Bodhi, “but this is a mirage.”

In ordinary consciousness the mind begins a cognitive process with some impression given in the present, but it does not stay with it. Instead it uses the immediate impression as a springboard for building blocks of mental constructs which remove it from the sheer facticity of the datum. The cognitive process is generally interpretive. The mind perceives its object free from conceptualization only briefly. Then, immediately after grasping the initial impression, it launches on a course of ideation by which it seeks to interpret the object to itself, to make it intelligible in terms of its own categories and assumptions. To bring this about the mind posits concepts, joins the concepts into constructs — sets of mutually corroborative concepts — then weaves the constructs together into complex interpretive schemes. In the end the original direct experience has been overrun by ideation and the presented object appears only dimly through dense layers of ideas and views, like the moon through a layer of clouds.” [ix]

Like the experience of phenomena in the senses, we can also root conceptual proliferation in biological processes. Biologist Edward O. Wilson goes on to write:

As energy enters the human being through the five senses, physical processes similar to seeing a red object multiply and combine to produce the mind. Mind is a stream of conscious and subconscious experience. It is at root the coded representation of sensory impressions and the memory and imagination of sensory impressions…Consciousness consists of the parallel processing of vast numbers of such coding networks. Many are linked by the synchronized firing of the nerve cells at forty cycles per second, allowing the simultaneous internal mapping of multiple sensory impressions. Some of the impressions are real, fed by ongoing stimulation from outside the nervous system, while others are recalled from the memory banks of the cortex. All together they create scenarios that flow realistically back and forth through time. The scenarios are a virtual reality. They can either closely match pieces of the external world or depart indefinitely far from it. They recreate the past and cast up alternative futures that serve as choices for future thought and bodily action…The mind is a self-organizing republic of scenarios that individually germinate, grow, evolve, disappear, and occasionally linger to spawn additional thought and physical activity…As the scenarios of consciousness fly by, driven by stimuli and drawing upon memories of prior scenarios, they are weighted and modified by emotion. What is emotion? It is the modification of neural activity that animates and focuses mental activity. [x]

The Buddha taught meditation practices to help us learn to live from the place of ancestral territory, resting in just what is arising in the senses. For example, by actively following the tactile sensations of the breath flowing in and out of our nostrils, we can experience just what is arising in the senses and witness the grasp of conceptual proliferation on our ordinary consciousness.

Many, many distractions will arise. A torrent of thoughts and plans and images and aches and pains. It does not matter. Recognize that you’ve lost touch with an awareness of the breath [just what is arising] and simply come back. If you have to begin again and again and again in the course of one sitting, that’s the practice. That’s what meditation is. [xi]

Marx described this full emancipation of human senses and qualities in the 1844 Manuscripts:

The transcendence of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object — an object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, and vica versa…the senses and minds of other men have become my own appropriation. Besides these direct organs, therefore, social organs develop in the form of society; thus, for instance, activity in direct association with others, etc, has become an organ for expressing my own life; and the mode of appropriating human life…man is not lost in his object only when the object becomes for him a human object…This is possible only when the object becomes for him a social object, he himself for himself a social being, just as society becomes a being for his in this object. [xii]

Marx sounds remarkably like the Buddha when he writes, “The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man…man is not lost in his object only when the object becomes for him a human object.” Marx posits a space of appearance where other human beings become our own appropriation, where we mediate together adequately as a species. How do we loosen our grip on the identity abstractions already constructed in the memory banks of the cortex that prevent us from making other human beings the end of all of our activity?

If you are a white, straight male and constructed by normative identities, the ability to rest in just what is arising in the senses allows you to be present with people with non-normative identities as they challenge the white supremacy, heteronormativty or sexism that binds with private property to produce unequal access to resources and personal trauma. The practice of meditation allows you to develop self-awareness about the construction of your own identity abstractions in the long historical process of conceptual proliferation and to understand how social patterns and relations of domination come to feel like natural laws. You can see how the enactment of your white, straight, male identities in the space of appearance harm the ability of others to survive and move into creative solidarity with them.

Learning to live from the place of ancestral territory, resting in just what is arising in the senses, creates a space of rebellion against the mechanisms that harden identity abstractions within the process of conceptual proliferation. It opens up a space to be present with the world and to queer the identity abstractions that prevent us from adequately adequately mediating together as a species.

Dedicated to Donald Trump and the Christian fascists who have his ear.

I was born in Queen Victoria hospital in Johannesburg, South Africa. The doctor slapped a gender into my body and told my mother, “You have a boy.” In South Africa during apartheid, where even homosexuality was criminalized, there were only two possible outcomes for gender: “boy” or “girl.” What I could not have understood as a child was that all kinds of other roles would grow out of being labeled a “boy.” I started learning at a very young age that “boys” were actually not allowed to be like “girls.”

Then I won the annual flower decorating competition at my all white elementary school. I can still smell the scent of the Magnolia and Honeysuckle blossoms in that arrangement. This transgression of gender norms was truly remarkable because of the hyper-masculinity that intersected with the racist-capitalism of apartheid, etched even on my feet by special boots to build my arches for mandatory military service. I don’t remember being bullied in the schoolyard for my prowess at flower decorating, but I do remember the profound shame I felt for transgressing the way “boys” were supposed to be. I did not need to be bullied. I’d internalized gender norms enough to simply bully myself. [Read more…] about Refusing to be a Man

Year after year, I see my straight friends. I want to see them, to see how they are doing, to add newness to our long and complicated histories, to experience some continuity. Year after year I continue to realize that the facts of my life are irrelevant to them and that I am only half listened to, that I am an appendage to the doings of a greater world, a world of power and privilege, of the laws of installation, a world of exclusion. “That’s not true,” argue my straight friends. There is the one certainty in the politics of power: those left out of it beg for inclusion, while the insiders claim that they already are. Men do it to women, whites do it to blacks, and everyone does it to queers. The main dividing line, both conscious and unconscious, is procreation … and that magic word — Family. Frequently, the ones we are born into disown us when they find out who we really are, and to make matters worse, we are prevented from having our own. We are punished, insulted, cut off, and treated like seditionaries in terms of child rearing, both damned if we try and damned if we abstain. It’s as if the propagation of the species is such a fragile directive that without enforcing it as if it were an agenda, humankind would melt back into the primeval ooze. [Read more…] about Queers Read This